


Le Gigantesque

by glitterburn (orphan_account)



Category: Formula 1 RPF
Genre: F1slash Summer Slash 2005, Gen
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2010-09-28
Updated: 2010-09-28
Packaged: 2017-10-12 06:39:30
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,175
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/121993
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/orphan_account/pseuds/glitterburn
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Mika learns the greatest lesson of his career.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Le Gigantesque

**Author's Note:**

> The challenge was based on paintings. My painting was 'Red, Yellow, Blue' by Piet Mondrian. My initial idea was to write a fic about 'thinking outside the box' – Mondrian, like certain aspects of F1, was very analytical. I decided to use the colours as representative of the teams that Michael Schumacher raced for – Jordan, Benetton, and Ferrari – and then I remembered that Jordan weren't yellow when Michael raced for that team.
> 
> So I scrapped that idea and decided to go with a pairing I'd wanted to write for ages – Mika Hakkinen and Ayrton Senna. The idea of going beyond boxes is still there somewhere, much more subtle than before, as is the use of the colours.
> 
> The quotations all come from an essay on Mondrian by David Sylvester at the Artchive website.

**blue**

 _"Focusing inwards is rejected by Mondrian when the object is rejected. Focusing inwards is involvement."_

"Racing is like prayer," Ayrton said to me one day.

It was completely out of the blue. We were both standing with our arms resting on the top of the pit wall at testing in Estoril, watching the cars circle the track. For me there was a certain idleness to the exercise, but for him there was only scrutiny, a kind of professional greed for knowledge.

I slanted a glance at him. Smaller than me in physical stature, he was still a giant amongst us. It was sometimes hard to remember that, or at least to reconcile it, when he came out with such strange statements.

"I suppose it must be," I said, at a loss as to how to reply in any other way. It was difficult to talk about religion in an arena where science ruled; but to talk about religion with Senna was like locking swords with an archangel.

I had heard the stories that Prost continued to put about of their time together at McLaren. Of how, when they were in the garage or the motorhome, Ayrton would talk constantly about religion: as fervent as a convert and as eloquent as a preacher. For Prost this was intolerable. He was a Catholic, too, yes, of course he was; but he did not need to discuss it with everybody. And besides, he would say with that cynical half-smile, how can Ayrton justify his actions on track with the moral code of his faith?

But Ayrton could. That day in Estoril, I learned how he could. It was through prayer, that first and last means of communication with God.

"There is no supposing about it," he told me before he fell silent to watch Verstappen sail past us, the engine of his car cough-growling all the way to the first corner.

"Then," I said, more to humour him than from anything else, "what happens when you don't get pole or you don't win the race? Do you think that God was too busy elsewhere to answer your prayers?"

He gave me a patient look. "No," he said. "It means that I did not pray hard enough. Or perhaps I simply did not deserve it."

I laughed, because I was young and stupid and didn't understand what he meant. "But prayer isn't the only way. Hard work, ability… surely these count for something?"

Ayrton shook his head and smiled at me with that special warmth he bestowed so rarely. He reached up and tousled my hair. I felt his fingers trace over my skull, lingering through my hair for a moment.

And then he said, his hand falling away, "Where do you think those gifts come from, Mika, if not from God?"

Later, I took the car out onto the track. Sweeping through the corners, feeling the slight shift in weight when the downforce came into play, my head jinking left and right and my body bathed in sweat beneath my Nomex, I wondered if this was what Ayrton meant by prayer.

Some drivers operate as if they're a kind of automaton. Michael, for example – he does that: drives like he has a computer instead of a brain, devoid of emotion. Prost is the same, although he has foibles and is still a man in a machine rather than an inhuman construct of the two entities.

As for myself, and I think with Ayrton, we worked by instinct. Gut reaction. Perception. If I feel X, then I know – not by logic, I just _know_ – that Y and Z will follow. Instinctive drivers, it is said, go through a race in a kind of trance: a communion with the car, the track, with everything that makes up the fabric of life around us.

And communion, I realised, is the same thing as prayer. That was why, to my mind at least, while Prost might be winning the championship, God was smiling on Ayrton.

***

 **yellow**

 _"Intense involvement with living things is involvement with death."_

On May 1, 1994, just seven laps into the San Marino Grand Prix, God stopped smiling, and my world was plunged into grief.

I was not alone in it. There were other mourners, some of who had a greater claim on him than I ever did. And I was jealous of them; and at the end of the day I was jealous of him, too, for going beyond and leaving us all to deal with this.

***

 **red**

 _"Mondrian wanted the infinite, and shape is finite. A straight line is infinitely extendable, and the open-ended space between two parallel straight lines is infinitely extendable. […] At the same time it stretches far beyond its borders so that it seems a fragment of a larger cosmos…"_

And then there was Adelaide.

When people ask me about the crash, I reply that I can't remember. They believe me. Who wouldn't? For those that saw the impact, it was a miracle that I survived. That I would remember anything about it would be almost too much. Better to think that I – that any racing driver in the same position – would switch off, be knocked unconscious, ready to revive again the moment the car came to a halt.

But I do remember; and it is a mass of grey heaving terror that scrapes out my belly and scours my throat, even today, a decade after it happened.

I heard soft black wings beating, beating, and thought – full of crazy panic – that Death was coming for me. A second later I knew it was my heartbeat, amplified in my ears by shock, thundering above the whine of the adrenaline, pulsing my blood from my nose and mouth.

I couldn't taste anything. So much blood, and I expected to taste it: copper and salt and sweet. But there was nothing, and when I moved my tongue it responded slowly, and my mouth dropped open and the blood poured out.

I think I knew I was choking to death. Asphyxiation is a slow drag of the soul into oblivion. If you fight it, panic erupts and clouds the mind. Surrender to it, and it produces moments of incredible clarity. I experienced both extremes, swinging from one to the other so fast that all I wanted was to rest, to sleep; but it was in a single snapshot of clarity that I remembered the pit wall at Estoril, standing with Senna and watching the cars.

I realised then that I had misunderstood him. He never prayed for victory. He prayed for life.

And as the life ran from me in deep red rivers, so I prayed, too.

 _Let me live_.

Today when I think of the miracle of my survival, I wonder, sometimes, if Ayrton's prayers were answered in a way he did not expect. I lived, and have slipped into comfortable obscurity, as will most of the current crop of drivers.

But Ayrton…

He will never die. Not truly. Even in death, he still lives.


End file.
